Friday, May 29, 2009

x-roads

We got back from Oberlin (& a side trip to Cleveland) Tuesday, J. with a howling respiratory infection, me just plain exhausted (what else is new?). The reunion, & the whole "college town" experience, was rather nice. I'd forgotten, in the many years since I've lived in an isolated place where higher education is the principal "industry," how cool it is to be in a community where liberal – nay, leftist, even ultra-leftist – is more or less the default political-cultural stance. Oberlin's recently appointed president, whom we ran into a half-dozen times over the weekend, bikes from his home to campus, & sometimes forgets to take leg of his suit trousers out of the sock into which he's tucked it (ie to avoid the cycle chain). I suspect the president of Our Fair University drives his block-long SUV the quarter-mile from his extravagant mansion (Barbie's Dream House, we call it) to his office.

The dorm in which we stayed was emblematic. Dating back I think to the 1880s; fronted by a striking monument to the Underground Railroad (on which Oberlin was an important stop); fitted with a fascinating "Dorm Orb" – a glowing sphere fixed into the second floor wall, which tracks the energy use of the entire dorm (green everybody's cool, red you're overusing the microwave & the hot water). Plastered everywhere there were signs letting you know that if you'd traveled a long distance to the reunion, you could conveniently buy carbon offsets on campus to compensate for all the jet fuel you'd burned. The dorm was equipped with "All-Gender" bathrooms; this wasn't especially a problem (tho it didn't create the kind of thrill I probably would have felt back in my own undergraduate days, when VA Tech dorms were still strictly single-sex & overnight stays were officially verboten) – what was a problem was getting access to one of the three, count 'em, three shower stalls serving the entire floor.

And heaven knows Obies know how to party, even when they've been away from the alma mater for over two decades. Which made for noise problems, given that party central seemed to be right under our feet.***I finally made it to the end of Volume II of the Ruskin Library Edition, the poems. I oughtn't to deprecate them too much: they're competent, sometimes even musical. Clearly, JR had saturated himself in the rhythms & tricks of Romantic English verse: he does quite a competent "funny" Byron, & at times even approaches the majesty of Wordsworth's blank verse. But the poems never quite catch fire, & serve mostly as teasers for the prose that he'll later come to write.

I'm a bit torn about Volume III, the first volume of Modern Painters. I'm direly tempted to plunge right in, even despite its 650+ page bulk, & report my findings as I go. But I've already blogged Modern Painters I, almost two years ago, it seems. For blogging purposes – ie for the 4 people out there who might conceivably be interested in a 20th-century poetry scholar's reading thru Ruskin – it would be best for me simply to read the ancillary materials (the long & rich introductions, the appendices, all the wonderful textual variations) of the next (chronologically) four volumes (MP I & II, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice I), then resume real blogging with The Stones of Venice II. But I'm not sure I can resist re-reading the volumes I read over the last 2 years, now in their sumptuous, ideal settings. Stay tuned.

***

On the other hand, I just acquired Dinah Birch's 2004 edition of Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford World's Classics). A solid & well-annotated smattering of every period & almost every genre of his writing, it seems. Methinks one could even teach a Ruskin seminar one of these days, given Birch's & Wilmer's anthologies, plus whatever other paperbacks & online editions one could scrounge up.

6 comments:

The dorm was equipped with "All-Gender" bathrooms; this wasn't especially a problem (tho it didn't create the kind of thrill I probably would have felt back in my own undergraduate days, when VA Tech dorms were still strictly single-sex & overnight stays were officially verboten)...You'd be surprised-- I was just telling Emily the other night that I think the fact that my dorm freshman year had unisex bathrooms actually discouraged me from objectifying women. There was always the chance that you might get to see something "thrilling," but if you tried to look for it, you knew you'd get a reputation for... well, hanging around the bathroom looking for something thrilling. And let's face it-- it's hard to objectify the women who shit (and, on some nights, vomit) in the stalls beside you...

I don't regret the shared bathrooms at my dear alma mater, but it wasn't quite the erotic experience people often imagine it was.

"it's hard to objectify the women who shit (and, on some nights, vomit) in the stalls beside you" -- yes, & that's the point, innit? & conversely, the "thrill" I project back on my 19-yr-old self is largely a product of the interdiction.

(Note by the way I didn't say "unisex," which would be imposing a single identity on what is in reality a diversity, but "All-Gender": the doors were coded with round symbols that incorporated the arrow from the "male" thing, the cross from the "female" thing, & an Artist-formerly-known-as-Prince in-between thingy.)

To be honest, I'm guessing that we called our bathrooms "unisex" because that's what they called the shared bathroom on Ally McBeal, if I recall. But your reasoning is much better. In our defense, we were watching too much crap TV and were wicked high.